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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28199427">The legacy of haunted houses</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/SayNevermore/pseuds/SayNevermore'>SayNevermore</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Mechanisms (Band)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood Drinking, Character Study, Found Family But They're Not There Yet: The Fic, Gen, Graphic Description of Corpses, Relationship Study, Trust Issues, in which I justify thinking too much about cyberian worldbuilding but only if you squint</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:15:46</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,588</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28199427</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/SayNevermore/pseuds/SayNevermore</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Considerations on bodies, corpses, and being the new immortal son of a vampire.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Dr Carmilla &amp; Jonny d'Ville</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The legacy of haunted houses</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I wanted to write something else entirely but this is what came out instead. I hope this will be enjoyable by anyone who does not have the same strong opinions about vampires that I have.<br/>Please mind the warnings in the tags, I haven't written this to be intentionally upsetting but I still don't hold back.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the lowest depths of the ship, they find bodies.</p><p>Maybe they’re corpses; Jonny isn’t sure what the distinction is. He has seen corpses, back in New Texas. He’s seen them fresh, still warm, even; usually suffering from one or two fatal injuries from which their blood poured out, fast and nauseating. Death, he found out, stinks almost immediately: a thick, sick smell of <em>meat</em> that seems almost eager to exhale out of open flesh. But Jonny has seen old corpses too. Often abandoned on the sides of the road, or in the back of alleyways, they lie dry and shriveled by the hot air of the desert. Their bellies open by gasses pushing out, or by rats digging in. Faces gaunt and green and falling apart as the insects clean the bones. Death, in Jonny’s world, is ugly. It’s a mess. That is why he can’t quite put the word on what he is currently looking at: the bodies are too clean, floating gently into the oxygenated plasma of their individual lifepods. Not a hair on their heads, not a scar on their skin. Large wires are plugged to the back of their necks, but Jonny can’t see the hole, so they might as well be intact. </p><p>There are hundreds, thousands of them. All of them identical. Lined up against both walls like clothes on a rack. This is what they are, in a way. Cyberia doesn’t have an army in the traditional sense. The royals have virtual troops that they upload at will when they need them dispatched. The bodies in the pods are empty, for now. Just pretty encasings for souls currently saved on a computer drive. That is why it is both very easy to board a cyberian ship, and incredibly difficult to actually steal one. It is constantly filled and not filled with thousands of soldiers, ready to open their eyes as soon as the ship’s AI alerts HQ against intruders. A schrödinger's box of industrial proportions. </p><p>The doc’s words, not Jonny’s. Jonny doesn’t know what the fuck a schrödinger is, and doesn’t care. Jonny is busy trying not to imagine what it must be like, to only be alive every time someone wants you to march to your death. He’d love it if the doc could stop monologuing as they walk around the empty ship, like he needs a history lesson. He knows everything he needs, already: there was one chance for them to just walk in and claim the ship as their own, and it was to be here just in time for a fortuitous revolution to provide for ample options of Cyberian higher ups to snatch among the chaos.</p><p>A shame, if Jonny’s being honest. It’s been a while now since the last time he’s stood with a fresh corpse at his feet, and it would have made for a nice tale if he’d stood in front of thousands. But the doc seems to think that the two of them alone couldn’t have taken care of an entire battalion before reinforcement arrived. Most importantly, she did not want to have to fight against the ship’s AI, closing doors before them, emptying closed rooms of all oxygen, turning its weaponry against itself to take them out. Immortality only takes you so far when your enemy also has all the time in the world and a creativity to match. That’s what the cyberian higher up is here for. </p><p>Well. They left her in the medbay. Jonny weighed his luck; an unknown Cyberian princess alone with systems she knows better than he and the doc ever will, or doctor Carmilla alone in the bowels of the ship. For now, he’s accumulated more evidence against the latter than the former. If she has something in mind, he wants to see it coming.</p><p>He doesn’t like what she’s done to the lady’s blood.</p><p>Doctor Carmilla said, <em>I want a cyberian lab</em>, like it’s a thing she can treat herself with on payday. It only took almost a decade of brewing revolution before the stars aligned for them to get close to one. In the meantime Jonny had time to die on three different planets he had never even heard of, and get sick of seeing his own face in the mirror stubbornly refusing to grow a beard. The doc says with the lab, she should be able to make a few alterations to his mechanism. Maybe this will be worth it. </p><p>In the time they’ve spent flying around the cyberian system, taking advantage of its chaotic internal politics, Jonny also died several times from the hand of Carmilla herself. More times than he can count, really. She doesn’t even warn him, most of the time, when she’s hungry. When she feels amenable she simply grabs his hand, helps herself through the thin skin of his wrist. But there is something of a hunting instinct in her, and she hides, sometimes, until she can take him by surprise, tackle him on the floor, break his neck with long, sharp fangs. Jonny has never met another vampire, can’t tell if it’s a thing they all have in common or if the doc’s fucking insane. It doesn’t change how viscerally repulsing it is to feel himself bleed out, more blood wasted than blood drunk, his mechanical heart desperately pumping dry. </p><p>So there is, it turns out, one good thing to come out of not having cut the entire regiment to pieces: it’s not him that Carmilla is looking at with hungry eyes, right now. </p><p>When the pod finally breaks and the body slouches forward with the pouring plasma, it’s easier to think of it as a corpse. It weighs heavily against Jonny and Carmilla - Jonny, mostly, while Carmilla hangs on to her cane, trying not to stumble backwards. It’s wet and cold, slightly squishy, and Jonny almost wants to drop it on the floor and see if it explodes like an overripe fruit. But Carmilla holds it all the way down, and kneels next to it on the now sticky ground, and holds the head down to get a better angle. Jonny sees the skull cave slightly when the doc applies pressure, like the soft bones of a baby.</p><p>He could probably leave. But it’s the first time he gets to see what it looks like from the outside. He’s nothing if not curious. </p><p>It’s messy, the process. Carmilla bites, and sucks, but too much blood pours out and flows everywhere, and every time she stops to breathe she bites back down slightly off target, and soon the neck she’s eating from looks like minced meat, and she’s just rolling the body over to destroy the other side, until the head looks like it’s hanging from a thread. The blood mixes with the plasma on the floor, it’s lapping at her clothes and at Jonny’s boots. It’s so full of oxygen it looks almost orange. And the smell doesn’t have time to reach Jonny’s nostrils, obliterated by the industrial scents of the environment. Death, in the lowest deck of the Aurora, smells like fuel and disinfectant. </p><p>“Tastes stale,” Carmilla says after she’s done, and for a moment, she gags and spits red saliva back on the mangled body. Jonny doesn’t know how much blood a vampire really needs - obviously, Carmilla only ever drinks a fraction of the messes she makes. She can stay a few days without food, but when she does, she turns progressively grey and stiff, like the corpses on the side of the road. She has spent a long time working on the cyberian girl. To the point where Jonny almost thought the doc was going to starve and turn to dust before she completed the mechanism. But then the girl was done, and Carmilla was hungry.</p><p>She’s made her mechanism out of blood.</p><p>Jonny doesn’t like that Carmilla has made the girl <em>inedible</em>. </p><p>“Don’t like canned food, huh? Too bad, looks like you’ve got centuries of it here.”</p><p>He still holds his hand out for Carmilla to help herself back on her feet, and holds her cane for her to grab. Even at her best, right after a meal, she often needs help standing straight. Sometimes it’s when she looks most vulnerable - covered in another’s blood, her lips red and cheeks pink, her breath short, her eyes bright. She looks so strangely human.</p><p>In the few years now he’s followed her around, Jonny has managed to get the upper hand on her four times. Four times she waited too long, was too weak when she turned to him, and Jonny took his chances. Four times was enough to learn his lesson. She does not regenerate like him. It’s definitely a vampire thing. There's no way <em>his</em> regeneration involves so much nightmare fuel. Each failed escape only confirmed to him that doctor Carmilla is too much of a monster for him to keep existing near.</p><p>When the hunger is sated, though, Jonny can almost forget. That she keeps him around so that she always has a prey.</p><p>“We’re not keeping them,” Carmilla says. “We’ll throw them all out as soon as we’re ready to go. I don’t want our new recruit thinking she can use them to her own advantage.”</p><p>And just like that, defiance sits back in at the bottom of his stomach. He bares his own teeth to the doc for a short, barking laugh.</p><p>“You don’t trust her to be loyal, then?”</p><p>“Do you?” she asks, all smiles under the dried blood.</p>
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